Archive for September, 2012

The short-live FOX series Harsh Realm doesn’t have a lot of literary elements, and as it is a rather brief affair there are videos (of music from the series) at the end of the post to make up for the lack of material.

Pilot

The main character, Thomas Hobbes is named for the philosopher of the same name (05 Apr 1588 – 04 Dec 1679).
Pinocchio is named for the main character in the 1883 Carlo Collodi novel The Adventures of Pinocchio.Le Morte D’Arthur – Thomas Malory (part 1, part 2) the seat Hobbes enters Harsh Realm through has “seige” / “perilous” carved in the armrests

This is the start of a semi-regular feature – every time I have nothing else urgently requiring my attention, I’ll put up a list of books seen in films and television shows. It is, of course, based on the Rory List which Abby featured on her blog. To open with I wanted to pick a film I really love, but I could probably have planned this better. For Fight Club, the list of books is staggeringly small – Anger Kills by Redford Williams, M.D. & Virginia Williams, PH.D. is the only book whose cover clearly seen, and there are a couple of quick flashes of a dictionary when the Narrator is having the skin on the back of his hand burned away. It isn’t a lost cause for magazines as the Fürni furniture catalog (which I’m pretty sure is fictitious) and Movieline (Jul 1995) are shown. Also, the Narrator reads from Annotated Reader (which I would Google to find out the deal behind it, but I was kinda disheartened by the lack of a juicy list to put together and didn’t bother. In addition, the line “You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world” is inspired by Also Sprach Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, for those of you who need to know this kind of stuff. As I pointed out, I could have planned this better.

So… What about some other film? Children Of Men, perhaps… There are a lot of books used as background filler, though actually displaying them on-screen is rarer than it could have been. Man, everyone else seems to be either waaay better at this shit than I am, or they are picking the easy films and television shows to do this with. I couldn’t make out any of the titles in the damn film, even though Theo walks past stacks of books during the course of the film. Maybe “boy films” are the problem. Possibly looking at the books in comedies would throw up more examples of what I am looking for. C’mon, it can’t be that hard to find characters reading on film.